Alpha Caius Voss did not return to his bed. He remained anchored behind his desk as the horizon transitioned from pitch black to a bleak, ghostly grey, and finally into the flat, clinical white of an Ashborne morning. He sat immersed in the ashes of thirty years of forged paperwork: ledgers that had dictated everything he believed regarding his pack's internal stability. He was adjusting to the psychological weight of ruling an empire that had been engineered by a monster before he was even born.
At six o'clock, he marched into the central training yard. He ran harder and faster than he had in months — not because the physical exertion cleared his mind, but because his massive frame required an outlet for the raw biological aggression his intellect could no longer contain.
When he return
